Zega offers low energy, internet connected cooking

An Aussie firm is selling a versatile internet-connected cooking pot with unusual capabilities.

Zega intelligent cookware: The Zega Digital.

Seven years ago, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Belkin showed off a Crock-Pot slow cooker that could be controlled remotely via the internet.

You’d add the ingredients in the morning, go to work, and set the timer. If during the day you knew you’d be home, say, two hours later than planned, you could remotely switch it off, change the timer, and alter the temperature.

Belkin made it available in the US as part of a partnership with Jardin who owns the Crock-Pot line there, but Belkin sadly didn’t sell this device in Australia.

Nor have we seen much of the June Oven, with its 12 modes of operation including as a convection oven, air fryer, grill, roaster, slow cooker, toaster, pizza oven and more. It also recognises the food you place in it. June is now owned by Weber who says it will promote June and create its own intelligent cookware.

It’s therefore good to see an Aussie firm take the matter of clever cookware into its own hands with Zega intelligent cookware. Zega Holdings is a Sydney based company that raised $109,170 from 583 backers on crowdsourcing site Indiegogo to get this project going.

Brendan and Con Dunne have spent their careers designing cookware for other brands. They estimate their designs have led to the manufacture of 25 million consumer products for some of the world’s largest brands. Zega is essentially their breakout project and they have taken two years to develop this line of intelligent cookware.

Zega makes two versions of this big pot, the Zega Digital and Zega Analogue. They are basically the same, however the digital version is internet connected and I have been cooking with it.

It’s also what Zega calls “walkaway cookware”. You place your ingredients in the pot, select the recipe or type of meat/main item that you are cooking with the Zega app, and heat it on your stove, usually for only a few minutes. The knob on the pot and the app tells you when to remove it from its heat source.

The Zega Digital with its internet connected dial

You then leave the Zega away from the stove to “self cook”. That could be for 30 minutes for fish, or more than two hours for some meat varieties. In self cooking mode, the Zega retains the heat thanks to double wall thermal insulation similar in principle to a thermos flask. it’s a layer of air between two sheets of 18-10 stainless steel.

The self cooking time varies depending on whether the main item is chicken, fish, pork, beef, lamb or vegetables. The app will tell you when the food is ready.

The benefits are the energy saving by only briefly using a power source, confidence you can leave the cooker unsupervised in self cook mode, and knowledge that you will receive a smartphone notification when dinner is ready. You could be at home, in the garden, or out walking the dog.

Testing the Zega Digital

I was walking in my local park when I received an Apple Watch notification that dinner was ready.

Zega says you don’t have to stay around to stir ingredients intermittently.

In theory you could heat the cooker and take it with you in a car to a dinner while it self cooks, but carrying around a hot tub sounds perilous to me.

My first trial was to steam salmon and some vegetables. The salmon came out perfectly although the vegetables were a touch underdone because the automatic timer setting for fish is short.

My second trial was to cook meat and vegetables using the provided shallow metal rack. This took more than two hours and the meat was soft and moist. The vegetables were fine too.

My meal of salmon and vegetables steam cooked with the Zega Digital

Zega supplies both the shallow metal rack and a larger rack for steaming that has a cheese grater on its underside.

In general there are two ways to proceed. You either make your own dishes from what’s in the fridge or follow the more than 50 recipes in the Zega app on your phone. The app recipes include ingredients and instructions and as usual, you start the cooking from within the app.

Alternatively, as I did, you use your own ingredients and select the “quick cook” option to choose the key ingredient (various meats or vegetables) which sets the timer.

The app tells you both when to turn off the heat source and then later when the food is cooked. You can check on the app clock how long cooking has to go.

The smarts of the cooker are contained in the intelligent Bluetooth-connected knob on the top. It has a small digital display which says whether the pot is heating up or self cooking, or when cooking is complete.

You remove the knob for charging; a USB cable charger is provided. The rest of the pot can be submerged in water as you’d expect, but the knob isn’t water resistant.

In the end this proved a handy cooking device. It’s not as sophisticated as Belkin’s US cooker. You can’t alter the cooking times remotely. But you can leave home knowing you’ll be informed of progress.

The idea of self cooking is interesting too. The cooker stores a lot of heat quickly when you initially place it on the stove but in self cooking mode releases it slowly, sometimes over several hours.

You set up cooking using the Zega app which notifies you of progress

Be aware cooking does take considerable time. While working at home, I’d spend around 5 to 10 minutes at about 4pm preparing meat and chopping vegetables, then heat the cooker, take it off the stove when prompted, and let it self cook while I continued working. It was set and forget.

There are conventional cookers in the market that can do what Zega does in terms of preparing food and Zega’s internet connected capability isn’t that sophisticated either.

But I did like the remote notifications and loved the self cooking concept. It’s a clever idea. I hope Zega goes further down this path.

The Zega pots are now shipping and are on special now from zega.com.au for $199 (digital) and $149 (analog). They’ll soon enough jump to their regular prices of $299 and $249 respectively.